RICE Template

Evaluate and prioritize project ideas based on reach, impact, confidence, and effort.

About the RICE Template

When developing a product roadmap, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. Your typical product roadmap contains a ton of moving parts – lots of exciting ideas that your team might be eager to implement ASAP. RICE is a great framework that helps you evaluate and prioritize – and we’re going to explain how it works.

Keep reading to learn more about the RICE method.

What is RICE

RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort – four factors to help you evaluate and prioritize ideas. When you think about your ultimate goal, delighting your customers, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed with all these new ideas. Teams might be tempted to dive right into the cleverest ones first, without taking into account the potential lift. When there’s so much to consider, how do you determine priorities?

This framework allows your team to carefully consider each potential project and assess its feasibility. Teams use RICE to gain perspective before starting a new part of the product roadmap.

When to use RICE

RICE is an adaptable scoring model. The beauty of this method is that it forces you to articulate and think through how and why a project idea will or will not have impact. It removes some of the emotion from the decision-making process, making it easier for teams to come to a consensus.

Use the method whenever you need to decide between several compelling ideas, or trying to assign priorities in a product roadmap. When your team is struggling to align or agree, the RICE method is a simple way to get everyone together for a productive discussion. Many teams also find it useful to employ RICE at the beginning of each major project or when planning a new product launch.

Create your own RICE framework

Making your own RICE framework is easy. Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share it. Get started by selecting the RICE Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.

Evaluate the Reach of a project. How many people will the project affect? Will your customer see a direct impact? Typically, teams measure Reach as the number of people impacted or the number of events occurring in a given time period. For some teams, this means customers per quarter. For others, page views per month. It’s important to try and quantify this value with real data, such as product metrics. Remember, the outcome of this exercise is a numerical value that will help you prioritize tasks.
Think about the Impact of the project. If Reach is how many people will be affected by this project, Impact measures the effect itself. For example, let’s say you’re launching a new paid feature in your app. Reach is the number of people affected by this launch, while Impact is how likely the launch is to convert them to paying customers. Unlike Reach, though, Impact can be difficult to quantify. Many teams evaluate Impact using a scale from 1 to 3, where 1 is low impact, 2 is medium, and 3 is high.
Define your Confidence level. How confident are you that this project will have the desired impact? It might be the greatest idea you’ve ever had, but if you don’t have the data to corroborate its success, it might not make sense to work on it right now. Confidence is evaluated as a percentage, where 100% is total confidence, 80% signifies optimism but not certainty, and 50% is low confidence. Anything under 50% is very low.
Think about Effort. What’s the total time it will take to complete this project? To evaluate Effort, don’t just think about the project itself, but also think about the teams who will contribute. It might take four days to complete the project as a whole, which breaks down into ten hours for engineering, twelve hours for marketing, and so on. Effort is measured in person-months, or the work that one team member can execute in a month.
Calculate your score. To get a RICE score for a particular task, perform the following simple calculation: Multiply Reach, Impact, and Confidence. Divide that value by Effort. That’s your score.
Repeat the process for each task. Then compile a list of tasks and scores to assess priorities.